AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Back in October of this year, I suggested that a deal might be in the wind whereby Netanyahu would offer a settlement building freeze in exchange for Israel spy, Jonathan Pollard’s freedom from jail in the US.

It didn’t happen then, but it seems that Netanyahu is now asking for Pollard’s release on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. Of course, he hasn’t yet offered a settlement freeze in order to get the talks going again but, then, even if they were to restart, we all know exactly how they’ll end.

Could it be that a behind-the-scenes deal has already been struck? Netanyahu is going to stick his neck out and ask President Obama openly in a public statement to release Pollard. If Obama then refuses to release Pollard, then relations between the US and Israel – or, more specifically, between Obama and the Zionists – are likely to go downhill and Netanyahu will lose lots of face.

If, on the other hand, Pollard is released, will Netanyahu then make a ‘goodwill gesture’ in return of ordering a freeze on settlement building, even just a little one?

North Korea has announced that they will view this as a direct provocation and will respond accordingly in retaliation. Any response from the North Koreans could then trigger a major conflagration on the peninsula that could even escalate to the use of nuclear weapons.

One cannot over-emphasise how dangerous this situation can become if the South Koreans go ahead as planned. Only three weeks ago the South Koreans fired artillery shells into the same area as they proposed to over the next few days. They were warned then that the North Koreans would retaliate and they did. So why do it again?

One needs to ask: who’s really to blame here for shoving this potential disaster, not just for the region, but for the world, right up to the edge?

One can rest assured that South Korea would be doing absolutely nothing to upset the North Koreans in this way without the full knowledge or encouragement or even instigation of the US.

America has become desperate to find a way out of its economic and its domestic socio-political situation and war has always been seen as a panacea for its ills in the past both as a distraction from its woes and as a means of reuniting a fractured society. The problem is; America is very disunited and needs a very big distraction to bring back together again.

Let’s hope that a nuclear holocaust is not what these lunatics have in mind as a ‘distraction’!

China, a permanent member of the UNSC, has refused to concede to US demands that such a condemnation be include in any statement.

The South Korean firing of live shells toward disputed waters will begin once the fog has lifted.

UPDATE 2

It seems the US has been thwarted again in their efforts to get a war going against the North Koreans and the world can stop holding its breath yet again.

The South Koreans fired off their provocative artillery rounds into disputed waters (with thousands of miles of their own coastline that they can lob shells from ‘til their hearts are content, what else could it be but deliberate provocation?) without any of the promised retaliation from the North Koreans, a restraint, not doubt, instigated by the Chinese.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

The noisy racists of Australia and their cheerleaders in the Australian right-wing Murdoch press need to take the blame for the tragedies that have left hundreds dead in the seas around Australia. The policies they have demanded from successive governments culminated in yesterday’s tragedy that saw some thirty people, including women and children, drowned as they tried to reach Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.

Asylum seeking refugees are desperate to come to Australia and Australia’s racists are just as desperate to keep them out by trying to create an impression that public opinion actually supports their demands that boatpeople do not come to Australia. As a result, successive Australian governments, most of which are to some extent or another racist themselves and who have partially conceded to the racists demands in exchange for votes, have created conditions where asylum seeking refugees need to take extreme risks in order to try and touch Australian soil.

Ex-prime minister John Howard, a well known racist from way back, even went to the trouble of excising some of Australia’s island territories in order to deprive asylum seekers of any ability to claim having arrived in Australia. Refugees that reached these islands were transferred to off-shore facilities where they were kept in long drawn-out limbo whilst their claims were processed; a process that often took years for some refugees.

Following the recent tragedy off Christmas Island, Andrew Bolt, Australia’s most notorious racist and Islamophobe, was the first and quickest to jump on the politicisation wagon even before the tragedy had even finished unfolding by declaring in his online hate column that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Labor government had ‘blood on their hands’ for not being tough on asylum seekers claiming that by not being tough they are being ‘lured to their deaths’. Bolt later went on to accuse Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown, also of having ‘blood on his hands’.

Senator Brown had written an open letter saying, quite rightly, that it was Bolt that had blood on his hands for having supported the wars that created the refugee crisis in the first place.

The bottom line is this: Bolt and his comrades Tim Blair and Piers Akerman, together with their flock of supporters at their respective blogs, are racists that do not want non-European people, particularly Muslim people, in Australia. Bolt’s politicisation of this tragedy in order to advance his racist aims and his appalling and transparent facade of pretending to actually care about what happened to these people should disgust fair-minded Australians.

Monday, December 13, 2010

A report in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald today says that Australia’s intelligence agencies feared that Israel would launch an attack against Iran which might draw both the US and Australia into a potential nuclear war in the Middle East.

In a cable WikiLeaks have provided to the Sydney Morning Herald’s sister paper, Melbourne’s The Age, the US embassy in Canberra reported to Washington in December 2008 that the peak Australian intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), were concerned about a possible Israeli strike against Iran. Then in March 2009 another cable was sent to Washington, DC, from US intelligence agents in Australia saying:

The AIC's [Australian intelligence community's] leading concerns with respect to Iran's nuclear ambitions centre on understanding the time frame of a possible weapons capability, and working with the United States to prevent Israel from independently launching unco-ordinated military strikes against Iran.

They are immediately concerned that Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities would lead to a conventional war - or even nuclear exchange - in the Middle East involving the United States that would draw Australia into a conflict. (My bold emphasis added.)

The dates in relation to this exchange between American and Australian intelligence services are particularly interesting. On 27 December 2008 Israel launched its devastating attack against the people of the Gaza Strip, an attack which went on relentlessly until 18 January 2009. Israel then completed its withdrawal from the Gaza on 21 January 2009, just one day after Obama was sworn in as President but, more importantly, one day after President Bush left office.

Just as I noted in my blog of the 22 January 2009, it’s clear that Australia’s intelligence services were also concerned that Israel’s attack against Hamas in the Gaza Strip may well have been a prelude to an Israeli attack against Iran. Having failed a little over two years earlier in 2006 to escalate their war against Hezbollah in Lebanon to find casus belli to attack Iran, Israel had tried yet against to provoke a regional war that would include an attack against Iran this time by attacking Iran’s other ally, Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Clearly, Australian intelligence was concerned that an attack against Iran by Israel would automatically bring in the US. Australian intelligence would also have known – and hence the concern – that Israel could not possibly attack Iran without being covertly in connivance with the US. In other words, an Israeli attack against Iran could never be truly ‘unilateral’.

While Obama was President-elect, Bush was still actually the President and, therefore, still Commander in Chief. Even as late as the last days of Bush’s presidency in January 2009, if Israel had attacked Iran, Bush would undoubtedly have been there to help them and Obama would have had no choice then but to finish the job off. It was this that the Australian intelligence community feared.

The question now is; will Obama be complicit in any further Israeli plans to attack Iran and under what pretext might such an attack take place? What is for sure from the March 2009 cables when, by then, Obama was president; is that the Australian intelligence community were not convinced that Obama would behave any differently from Bush with regards to Israel launching a ‘unilateral’ attack against Iran.

The real big question now is; are the Australian intelligence community any more convinced today that Obama won’t be complicit in an attack on Iran – and what are America’s expectations of Australia in the event of such an attack?

However, since Israel knows full well that Iran has no actual ‘nuclear weapons program’, one needs to ask why then are they assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists?

The answer is simple; they need to convince the world that the Iranians indeed do have a ‘nuclear weapons program’ in order to get world public opinion to support an attack on Iran.

Since the relentless rhetoric and propaganda coming from Israel and the US over the years about Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ has not as yet had the desired effect, the Israelis have launched a campaign to make their assertions more convincing. They have done this by stating that they have intelligence confirming Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that the evidence is so compelling that they are prepared to assassinate some of Iran’s nuclear scientists in order to stop the Iranian’s from having a bomb.

The evidence the Israelis claim to have comes from an Iranian laptop stolen in 2004 and is said to have had drawings confirming the existence of a nuclear weapon program. However, it has since been revealed that the documents and the so-called ‘evidence’ are fraudulent. This, though, has not deterred the Israelis from their determination to convince the world that the Iranians are out to destroy Israel with their nuclear weapons.

Despite all the rhetoric and the ratcheted up desperate propaganda of assassinating innocent scientists to convince the world, there is still not a skerrick of any evidence whatsoever to support any of Israeli and US claims that Iran has a ‘nuclear weapons program’.

When will the world wake up to Israel’s crimes? And for how long are Americans willing to be an accessory to those crimes?

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Two of Australia's foremost pseudo-intellectual racists and right-wing extremists, John Izzard, a frequent writer for the right-wing magazine Quadrant and Quadrant Online, and Keith Windschuttle, the well-known ‘Stolen Generations’ denialist and perverter of Aboriginal history, have both written articlesdefending Andrew Bolt as he is about to face Federal Court to answer charges of racial vilification.

The charges against Bolt have been made by a group of Aboriginal activists who are suing Bolt over two articles that he wrote for the Herald Sun newspaper that employs him. In the first article written in April 2009 and titled ‘White is the new black’, Bolt accuses Aboriginal people whose appearance happen to be white but who still prefer to identify themselves as indigenous, of being ‘political Aborigines’ and accuses them of identifying as Aboriginals for nefarious purposes.

In the second article titled ‘White fellas in the black’, written in August 2009, Bolt similarly accuses Aboriginal people of identifying themselves as Aboriginal in order to gain pecuniary advantages by way of grants and awards.

The question about who is black and who is white – or who is Aboriginal and who is not – is the centrepiece of the pending legal debate and both Izzard and Windschuttle discuss the background to this argument while carefully avoiding any direct discussion as to how this relates to Bolt’s case through fear of contemptuously pre-empting the courts decision.

There is also a secondary implication related to this case. Bolt argues that any decision restraining him from publicly speaking or writing about how he feels about this subject – or, indeed, any subject – violates his rights to freedom of speech and this aspect of the case is also touched on, albeit lightly, again presumably not to pre-empt any decision by the court, in the Izzard and Windschuttle articles.

If this were an isolated incident of a group of people who simply took umbrage to what someone else had said about them in the course of, say, incidental discussion then the matter would be easily resolved one way or the other by a court or even settled prior to going to court. But, in this case, it is not that simple.

While the question of ethnicity is at the centre of the debate from the legal point of view, and the question of freedom of speech will give cause for further debate depending on the judgement that will eventually be handed down, there are other, in many ways, even more important issues at stake here particularly when they relate to Andrew Bolt and his kind.

Bolt is a high profile journalist and blogger employed by a Rupert Murdoch-owned mainstream newspaper. He is well known for his racism particularly in relation to Aboriginal peoples. He is also a well known Islamophobe and xenophobe, climate change denier and pro-pollutionist.

Apart from the legal specifics relating to the case, there is also the moral question of why Bolt continually sees it necessary to vilify Aborigines and non-European foreigners at every opportunity at his blog. He does this mostly by innuendo, inference and the occasional classic double entendre whereby he writes on a subject seemingly totally unrelated to his usual run-of-the-mill xenophobic or racist rants but which is clearly meant to convey an opinion that is so offensive he could not possibly write it directly without facing further charges of vilification and discrimination. An example of this can be found here.

Bolt usually takes care not to cross the line himself. He does this by cutting and pasting sometimes quite long extracts of other peoples work obtained from all over the blogosphere and, if it’s really offensive, he ensures that the authors are out of legal reach. He then relies on his small but vocal coterie of regular commenters at his blog to endorse and amplify his intended opinion with many of the comments sometimes interpreting that opinion in a manner so crude and offensive that even Bolt or his moderators need occasionally to censor or ’snip’ it.

Bolt’s blog is not just an obscure column tucked away in some online digital recess but, rather, it is an upfront showcase of right-wing bigotry and outright racism. It’s not just Bolt the racist. The racism comes as a complete packing which is his blog; it’s ‘Bolt’s Racist Blog’, almost an entity in itself, which shamefully is paid for and published by Rupert Murdoch, and its influence, unfortunately, is potentially powerful.

It is unfortunate that Bolt’s racist views about Aboriginal people and boatpeople have now fraudulently influenced public opinion to the extent that politicians are now formulating policies relating to these peoples based on the ill-informed views of only a small but vocal rednecked and racist minority group of Australians.

One hopes that the complaints against Bolt are upheld and, while it is unlikely to see an end to the likes of Bolt’s racism, at least it would have demonstrated that Bolt’s racism is not acceptable in a multicultural society such as Australia’s.

In the same article, the ‘Jerusalem Post’ quoted Bolton as saying: “Given that diplomacy has failed, given that sanctions have failed, the only alternative to an Iran with nuclear weapons is a limited military strike against the nuclear weapons program”.

In the past, Bolton has been unequivocal about the US or Israel mounting a military strike against Iran and there is no reason to believe that, if he ever did become President, he would not hesitate to attack Iran.

A military strike against Iran would not be just against its ‘nuclear weapons program’ – apart from anything else, the US and Israel know full well that Iran has no ‘nuclear weapons program’ – though the initial strike would be against Iran’s nuclear facilities since that will be the casus belli used by the Israelis and Americans for such an attack, but it would also include strikes against Iran’s defence facilities and government institutions. Such strikes, so the West would be told, would be to prevent any Iranian retaliatory strikes. However, the real purpose of any attack against Iran would be to affect regime change, which Bolton has said in the past would be the ideal aim of US foreign policy in the Middle East.

As the recent mid-term elections revealed, Americans are despondent, to say the least, with President Obama’s performance and lack of delivery of election promises particularly with regard to bringing an end to the wars. Unfortunately, with effectively only two political parties, Americans have little choice but to register their dissatisfaction by either simply not voting or giving their vote to the other side in protest (as against support for the other sides policies) in the hope that not too many votes go the other way but enough to make the incumbent sit up and think about realigning their policies. The mid-term elections achieved that but whether or not Obama will take note of the American vote remains still to be seen. So far it’s not looking good.

They say a week in politics is a long time, so two years while waiting for an opportunity to vote again must seem a lifetime for many. Certainly a lot can happen in those two years that could inexorably change yet again the perception we have about the future of our world. A wrong call over Korea, for example, could seemingly pale into insignificance any qualms either side have over the situation in the Middle East and Central Asia. But having said that, it should be realised that anything that happens in this world will inevitably have America stamped on it somewhere and that the geo-political realities of what is happening in the Middle East are inextricably linked to what is happening over Korea and with China as the world watches the power-play taking place between super-powers anxious to secure hegemony in resource rich regions of our planet.

For Bolton that power-play revolves around the Middle East rather than South East Asia. He sees a strong Israel as essential to American interests in the region as a more urgent problem to be dealt with than South East Asia. He believes the Middle East should be secured first and that Israel is the tool by which the Middle East can be tamed especially once the Mullahs of Iran have gone and their so-called ‘proxies’, Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria, weakened or destroyed. Once gone, and Israel has created its Greater Israel dream, then the US can deal with China. Bolton believes that a strong display of no-nonsense force against Iran will bring North Korea to heel – that and more sanctions.

John Bolton is the most hawkish of the neoconservative warmongers itching to bomb Iran. The very idea of this man becoming the President of the United States should send a shiver down the backs of the peoples of the world. Come 2012 the people of America will have a stark choice; either more of the same under Obama which, incidentally, does not preclude the possibility that he too might attack Iran especially if Israel decides on a pre-emptive attack, or a Republican President who almost certainly would attack Iran – and who knows who else afterwards - if Bolton wins the nomination race and becomes President.

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About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
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